Just as learning’s greatest enemy is not ignorance, but what your are sure you are already know; the greatest challenge to listening is letting go of what you are certain of so that you can allow another person’s experience lead you to a higher, more integrated, and composite truth.
In times of crisis you need to be able to make decisions based on what it right and not on what is most comfortable. When you are really scared – what have you got to hang on to? The only thing is to hang on to is – what is the right thing to do? Because nothing else can be trusted as real.
Leaders who feel they must come up with the perfect plan endure huge pressure. In playing the role of the heroic leader they become the organisational bottle neck. In telling everyone that they know the way forward; they disempower everyone around them. This mind set is the main obstacle to agility.
Right now, the capacity to pay attention, make sense, act and change ahead of the curve is the holy grail of most organisations and if it is not, it should be.
In addition to our ability to analyse and predict we need to learn to engage directly with what is happening now so that we can learn faster from what just happened. Organisational strategy becomes “just-in-time” and “just-in-case” supported by more investment in general knowledge, diversity, the ability to do a quick study and the capacity to respond to intuition.
What may look like a people problem is often an environment, situation, or system problem. Organisations are brimming with misdiagnosed problems. Just as a caged bird is so close to the bars that it does not know it is in a cage, we too do not recognise the structures that surround us. Rather we just find ourselves conditioned to behave in certain ways.